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We gotta pick up a couple o' A.B.'s in Juneau, if so be we can." "How about the loot?" objected Strokher. "If one of those hands gets between decks he might smell a sea-otter, now. I put it to you he might." "My son," said Hardenberg, "I've handled A.B.'s before;" and that settled the question.
To the Aleut mind nothing approaches a sea-otter hunt, for it affords not only the keenest sport, but the greatest possible financial reward. The method of the hunt is somewhat complicated in some of its features. When the otter dives the boats gather in a circle, and as soon as it appears every bowman does his best to strike it with an arrow.
Clothing of sea-otter skins of priceless value, which afterwards proved a fortune to those who survived, and food of the flesh of the great sea-cow, saved a remnant of the wretched crew.
In 1787 Portlock and Dixon had secured almost two thousand sea-otter skins as far north as the Queen Charlotte Islands. These were things Meares did not tell the Americans. It would have been to acknowledge that an abundance of furs was there to draw so many trading-ships. But during the winter at Nootka the men from Boston learned these facts from the Indians.
One immediate result of the independence of this colony is the opening of her ports to all nations, and the consequent impetus given to commerce. The North American States have been the first to make use of the privilege. The exports of California now consist of corn, ox-hides, tallow, and the costly skins of the sea-otter.
The latter is a kind of sea-snail without a shell, which not only here, but on the Ladrones, Carolinas, and Pelew Islands, even as far as New Holland, is as eagerly sought after as the sea-otter on the north-west coast of America. The luxurious Chinese consider them a powerful restorative of strength, and purchase them as such at an exorbitant price.
The method of the natives who hunt the sea-otter is to make a surround with a fleet of bidarkas, much as they hunt the whale; but this, of course, was impossible now. None the less, Jimmy, who assumed the position of master of the hunt, motioned to the Aleut boy in the dory to keep off to the left, while he and Rob circled far to the right in the bidarka.
Sea-otter were found and taken in thousands at Sitka Sound, in Yakutat Bay, Prince William Sound, Cook's Inlet, and all along the chain of eleven hundred Aleutian Islands to the Commander Group, off Kamchatka. Where they were found in thousands then, they are seen only in tens and hundreds to-day. Where they are in hundreds one year, they may not come at all the next, having been too hard hunted.
Or if such a hurricane gale was churning the sea so that gusty spray and sleet storm washed out every outline, sweeping the kelp beds naked one minute, inundating them with mountainous rollers that thundered up the rocks the next, the Aleut hunters risked life, scudded out on the back of the raging storm, now riding the rollers, now dipping to the trough of the sea, now scooting with lightning paddle-strokes right through the blasts of spray athwart wave wash and trough straight for the kelp beds or rocky boulders, where the sea-otter must have been driven for refuge by the storm.
There are three rocky islets near its southern entrance, inside of Point Patience,* which I have called the Sea Lion* Islets, these mammal having been seen upon them by the native sea-otter hunters. There is a good canoe landing in pleasant weather on the shore opposite, but in stormy weather it breaks all around the bay.
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